April Watson is the Curator of Photography at The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where she has worked for seven years. She holds a BFA in graphic design from Alfred University, and MA in art history from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, and a PhD in art history from the University of Kansas, where she completed dissertation on post-WWII photographers of the American social landscape. At the Nelson-Atkins, she has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Impressionist France: Visions of Nation from Le Gray to Monet, which was co-organized with Simon Kelly at the Saint Louis Art Museum; Heartland: The Photographs of Terry Evans, a career retrospective of the artist; About Face: Contemporary Portraiture; Thinking Photography: Five Decades at the Kansas City Art Institute; Time in the West: Photographs by Mark Klett & Byron Wolfe and Mark Ruwedel; Human/Nature: Recent European Landscape Photography; and Hide & Seek: Picturing Childhood. She is currently at work on an exhibition of photographs featuring American soldiers and military personnel, from the Civil War to the present day. She lives in Kansas City with her husband, photographer Elijah Gowin, and their two daughters.

Elizabeth Siegel is Associate Curator of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked for over ten years. She received her undergraduate degree at Yale and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Among her recent exhibitions are Abelardo Morell: The Universe Next Door, a retrospective traveling to the J. Paul Getty Museum and High Museum of Art; Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks, which traveled to the deYoung Museum, San Francisco, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Richard Misrach: On the Beach; and Photo-Respiration: Tokihiro Sato Photographs. Her books include Playing with Pictures; Taken by Design: Photography at the Institute of Design, 1937–1971; and most recently Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums. She is currently working on a major exhibition on the history and aesthetics of 3D photography and film. She lives in Chicago with her husband, Greg Jacobs, a documentary filmmaker, and their two daughters.

Joyce Elaine Grant Exhibition 2013

Sarah Kennel is associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. She holds a PhD in art history from the University of California, Berkeley, where she completed a dissertation on the relationship between dance and modernism in early 20th-century France. At the National Gallery, she has curated or contributed to numerous exhibitions and related publications, including André Kertész (2005), Paris in Transition: Photographs from the National Gallery of Art (2006); The Art of the American Snapshot (2007); In the Forest of Fontainebleau: Painters and Photographers from Corot to Monet (2008); In the Darkroom: Photographic Processes before the Digital Age (2009); and The Serial Portrait: Photography and Identity in the Last One Hundred Years (2012). She is currently organizing the exhibition Charles Marville: Photographer of Nineteenth-Century Paris, slated to open in 2013. She has taught classes in the history of art at the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University and George Washington University.

About the Joyce Elaine Grant Annual Exhibition

Established in 2001 and organized by the graduate photography students at Texas Woman’s University and the Photographic Artists’ Coalition (a student-run photography organization), the annual Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition provides a national venue for the exhibition of artistic expression as seen through the eye of the camera. Photographers from throughout the United States are invited to submit entries for the exhibition, then works are juried by an invited professional in the photographic field. The exhibition is on view to the public at the Texas Woman’s University Fine Arts Galleries every Spring semester.

The exhibition and endowment was established by alumnus Christine Shank and a small group of graduate students and named in memory of the mother of Professor Susan kae Grant. Exhibition proceeds will help fund the Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition Endowment that will fund photography scholarships for future graduate students in the Department of Visual Arts.

Texas Woman’s University is a comprehensive public university, primarily for women, offering baccalaureate, masters and doctoral degree programs and is the largest university for women in the United States. The University’s photography department has a legacy of excellence by empowering students to take risks, establish a broad vision of the field and develop a personal voice and working methodology.